The humane thing to do would be for such transfers to be able to take all your characters to the other servers.But going into the details seems useless seeing how Blizz doesn't care about anything else then green.

How does Blizz make more money each quarter when they are losing subs? They have to depend on other game sales and services in wow. Why give up something Blizzard charges for and cost them absolutely nothing to do? The amount of subs that manages to pull back would not even come close to offsetting the loss from losing this.

As for bundle xfers I would think of say $30-$50 to have the option to xfer all characters on one realm with a cd (3+ months) that will help a lot of people and I think people will be happy with it.

Free realm xfers will kill servers though. It'll make dead ones worse, and will kill others that are close to dead.

Race is not a needed change, it's a fotm thing, and if you want that extra dps, then you should pay for that. Free faction thing is also bad, it'll kill the community and would cause faction imbalance. Plus I can see people play(abuse) the AH with such a feature. Blizzard wants faction and race choice to matter. Race faction really isn't a issue and you shouldn't be able to swap and pretty much a whim. Even a 4-6 month cd will be bad for the game.

Dead realms and wanting to xfer but not wanting to pay to xfer all your alts over, I would say that's an issue. But I think some bulk, paid xfer option is best. Being able to freely xfer off for free (even with 4-6 month) will make the realm problem even worse. Being able to bulk xfer for cheap would too, but it wont be as bad.

Despite what people think, this isn't ALL about money. Sure most of it is. But free xfers is going to do more than just lose them the money from xfers. It'll make realms worse off (pushing some to quit) and make the community seem more disconnected, which is a major complaint people have with crz, lfr, etc, and will likely cause more people to quit. Blizzard has realm issues it needs to address, but free xfers inst it.

How does Blizz make more money each quarter when they are losing subs? They have to depend on other game sales and services in wow. Why give up something Blizzard charges for and cost them absolutely nothing to do? The amount of subs that manages to pull back would not even come close to offsetting the loss from losing this.

The best way to deal with the dead realm issue is get rid of them. There are too many realms and not enough players, this has been true even when we were at the peak number of subscribers. We've lost about 25% of the playerbase since the last string of new realms opened but all the realms are still up. The Korean mergers is what needs to be done. It sucks to lose your name but it sucks more to not have enough people on your realm. People bitched about it happening that way in FFXI and guess what? It was fine. The world didn't end. No puppies or kittens were kicked. The world of warcraft will go on.

I can understand it from Blizzards point of view it is a cash cow, easy money for them however it is starting to bite them in the ass and it will start to hurt more and more and more in the long run if they do not change this out dated policy.

Simple fact is the the OP is spot on if Blizzard follows what the OP posted with a few minor changes it will bring players back, players that now can't be arsed to log on to a realm that is dead.
Restricting the top 3-4 servers will make sure of that also, same as building in a balance system so say 20k people move into a sever they have to be 10k from each faction any over that sorry realm is full and closed go to another.
Yes Blizzard won't be making money of the transfers anymore but if it brings back a million or hell even 500k players they would make up for those losses easy.
The only problem I can see is that whoever make the descisions on this is a greedy bastard that wants money now and not money tmrw as those people are unable to see the simple fact is that today you get $10 but tmrw you get $15 these people simply can't see it and that is where the butthurt will increase more and more.

I can understand it from Blizzards point of view it is a cash cow, easy money for them however it is starting to bite them in the ass and it will start to hurt more and more and more in the long run if they do not change this out dated policy.

Simple fact is the the OP is spot on if Blizzard follows what the OP posted with a few minor changes it will bring players back, players that now can't be arsed to log on to a realm that is dead.
Restricting the top 3-4 servers will make sure of that also, same as building in a balance system so say 20k people move into a sever they have to be 10k from each faction any over that sorry realm is full and closed go to another.
Yes Blizzard won't be making money of the transfers anymore but if it brings back a million or hell even 500k players they would make up for those losses easy.
The only problem I can see is that whoever make the descisions on this is a greedy bastard that wants money now and not money tmrw as those people are unable to see the simple fact is that today you get $10 but tmrw you get $15 these people simply can't see it and that is where the butthurt will increase more and more.

or they know for a fact, from their internal metrics, sampling reason of unsubbing, that only a few 10s of thousand people would in fact comeback with free transfer, but they will loose millions of $$$ allowing free transfer.

another way to look at it, is that they don't want to cut a risk-free, dependable and proven to work method to make money on the off chance they might slow down the leak of player (because not every single player of the 1.3 millions unsub because of dead server)

I can understand it from Blizzards point of view it is a cash cow, easy money for them however it is starting to bite them in the ass and it will start to hurt more and more and more in the long run if they do not change this out dated policy.

Simple fact is the the OP is spot on if Blizzard follows what the OP posted with a few minor changes it will bring players back, players that now can't be arsed to log on to a realm that is dead.
Restricting the top 3-4 servers will make sure of that also, same as building in a balance system so say 20k people move into a sever they have to be 10k from each faction any over that sorry realm is full and closed go to another.
Yes Blizzard won't be making money of the transfers anymore but if it brings back a million or hell even 500k players they would make up for those losses easy.
The only problem I can see is that whoever make the descisions on this is a greedy bastard that wants money now and not money tmrw as those people are unable to see the simple fact is that today you get $10 but tmrw you get $15 these people simply can't see it and that is where the butthurt will increase more and more.

I'll give you a hint. Making transfers free is a simple concept, no doubt everyone who works at Blizzard has thought of it. Blizzard's company is full of marketers and econ majors, they know how much money they earn from transfers each month, they can estimate better than we can how many people will join wow if they make transfers free.

If transfers would of lead to an increase in money over the long run they would have done it long ago.

Guilds would just hop to whatever servers they want every couple months or so, depending on what comfort situation they're at. Populations on the server would shift drastically all the time too, since there is no limit on how many people transfer at a time, only how often. Server Transferring isn't something you do on a regular basis anyways, so once every few months is nothing. The Free Server Transfers in the past from high-pop to low pop servers happened on set dates, but if you came to a new server for some fresh scenery, the rest of the community would be in constant flux. This makes it even harder to grasp any sense of community or competition. One day your guild has a world boss on farm, the next day you could have 5 newly migrated guilds all up in your business.

I'll give you a hint. Making transfers free is a simple concept, no doubt everyone who works at Blizzard has thought of it. Blizzard's company is full of marketers and econ majors, they know how much money they earn from transfers each month, they can estimate better than we can how many people will join wow if they make transfers free.

If transfers would of lead to an increase in money over the long run they would have done it long ago.

one way to do it would simply be to see how many from those 1.3 millions that left are from reputed "dead" servers. Then for those, analyse the reason of the departure, and of course, don't assume that 100% of those who left because of dead server would come back, some might simply "move on".

yes, WoW is a billions dollars industry, i doubt any decision is taken lightly. They must have teams of economist, sociologist, psychologist that study and predict playerbase reaction. personnaly, with a business of this magnitude, i would.